Burma Shave

[NNadir]

I grew up in the age of Kerouacian "On the Road" fantasy, romance of the road, which, to my regret, I embraced. In the 1970's and 1980's, I drove my car across the US multiple times, Long Island to California and sometimes back again.

The song, a poetic, rendering, about that CULTure is Tom Waits "Burma Shave: "

"Some nights my heart pounds like thunder, don't know why it don't explode..."

Burma Shave refers to an advertising campaign by a company that put little riddles on a series of signs on the side of major highways in the 1950s and 1960s:

Burma Shave



Waits sings of it as a destination, in this case the destination being death.

I am barely old enough to remember seeing some of these signs, albeit when I was too young to shave.

A list of some of the road side jingles is here:

Burma Shave Roadside Jingles.

Regrettably, the car CULTure has been an unprecedented environmental disaster, just this side of a Mesozoic asteroid hitting the Earth, so there's that.

It's odd the things that come to mind at random.

[2naSalit]

1. I remember those signs...

We traveled by car a lot when I was a kid. My brother and I used to look for them as a game.

When the song came out, I was ending my trucking career and it brings to mind a couple trips across eastern Montana on Hwy 200and both Interstates crossing North and South Dakota. Reminiscent are the signs advertising Wall Drug, a tourist stop in South Dakota.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wall_Drug

[stopdiggin]

2. very, very little of anything resembling 'romance' involved on the 'open road'

Kind of like romanticizing 'cowboy' life

miserable, harsh, brutally hard, mind numbingly and soul crushingly lonely - and dirt poor without any prospect of future.
But, by all means, let's make it into something 'symbolic' and romantic.

"Oh, bury me not .. on the lone prarieeeeee .. "

[NNadir]

4. It depends on how you go about it. As a living, I guess I hear you. As a bourgeois kid traveling with girlfriends...

...in a car, or even just with friends on a one way or two way road trip, it was different.

My drives each way with my future wife and years later my wife herself were romantic to a point, until the confinement in the car made us cranky, the first way, in the Mohave at night; the way back, many years later, upstate New York.

I was never "lonely" on the road. I always did it with someone, except once, when my mother was ill with what in the end would kill her. I was so wasted on caffeine I barely remember it. I drove from Utah to Long Island, non-stop, a very dangerous enterprise, since I recall I was hallucinating on the George Washington bridge. I was 22, freaked out, terrified at what was coming, and I guess, stupid. I could have killed someone or myself, which would not have been good for my family. Somehow, I don't know how exactly, I made it. (The car blew an engine the week after I made it.)

I was, I concede, a dumb kid, but the road struck me as romantic at least when I was traveling with lovers or good friends.

I was a road warrior for a few jobs I had, but that was mostly via air and rental car. That often sucked, not always, but often.

[surfered]

3. I remember them. God, I'm old!

[Squaredeal]

5. I remember them as a boy, while traveling with my parents by car.

And then, one day, they were no more.

[AllaN01Bear]

7. howdi

when i was a younger bear, i messed around in a virtual wrold called active worlds . its a 3 d building site .
i made a strech of road and put up some of these signs which kind of read like this ,,,
https://phoebemoon.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/BS-Museum.webp